NOT OUR NATIVE DAUGHTERS: Empowering Indigenous Youth in Wyoming
Indigenous Youth Voices co-hosting 2025 Climate Week NYC at The New School. (Photo courtesy of Not Our Native Daughters)
Not Our Native Daughters (NOND) is a Native- and survivor-led organization dedicated to ending the trafficking, exploitation, and murder of Indigenous peoples through education, advocacy, policy reform, and community empowerment.
Centering Indigenous justice and healing, NOND works to create a future where Indigenous women, girls, and youth are safe, supported, and free from violence.
Lynnette GreyBull, Founder and Executive Director, is a community organizer, youth leader, restorative healing circle facilitator, and environmental justice changemaker. She is Northern Arapaho from the Wind River Tribe and Húŋkphapȟa Lakȟóta (Kopa Lakota) from the Standing Rock Tribe.
Lynnette, who comes from the anti-human trafficking movement, is also a subject matter expert on MMIW (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women) and lobbies for policy reform.
“We have the solutions as Native people”
In the 2010s, Lynnette was an advisor and consultant with the Amber Alert Program living in Phoenix, Arizona. She traveled to tribal communities to train them on identifying trafficking and establishing Amber Alert programs on their reservations.
“Some of the tribes did not want non-Native education or anything .gov to come into their community,” she said. “It led me down a road: if we’re cultivating education, it should be led by us. We have the solutions as Native people to cultivate our own trainings and education.”
Lynnette founded Not Our Native Daughters in 2014, with a primary goal of empowering the next generation of Indigenous youth to be leaders and changemakers.
“At that time, there weren’t too many Native nonprofit organizations focusing on the protection of Native women, children, and people,” she said. “So I started NOND. It’s led by us, through us, and nothing but us.”
Not Our Native Daughters became one of the many organizations that helped bring MMIW awareness to the lower 48—a movement that began with First Nations in Canada over a decade ago and has recently gained mainstream attention in the U.S.
In 2019, Lynnette successfully lobbied Wyoming’s governor to launch the Wyoming Missing & Murder Indigenous Persons Task Force, and a year and a half later she helped establish the MMIR Task Force of Colorado with other Native women.
Indigenous Youth Voices 2025 white water rafting excursion at Snake River, Wyoming. (Photo courtesy of Not Our Native Daughters)
In 2021, NOND launched their Indigenous Youth Voices program which provides culturally-grounded, healing-centered, and science-informed outdoor experiences that Native youth are often denied access to—such as white water rafting, snowboarding, hiking, and visiting national parks.
“We always bring elders from different tribes on our trips,” said Lynnette, “so there’s this cross-learning of traditional ecology knowledge and storytelling. Some of these stories can never be written down or published, they can only be shared verbally.”
The program also includes a Youth Advisory Board that meets once a month. Youth leaders have the space to be creative and innovative—deciding what they want to learn, talk about, include in the programming, and experience through outdoor recreation.
The Board was recently invited by the Tishman Environment & Design Center in New York City to co-host Climate Week NYC 2025. “They really get to step up in their leadership role and it’s a beautiful thing to see them blossom,” said Lynnette.
Lynnette grew up in Los Angeles but spent summers on the Wind River and Standing Rock Reservations. Eight years ago, she decided to move back to the Wind River community which is the heart of NOND’s work.
Wind River Reservation is the only Indigenous reservation in Wyoming. It houses two tribes, Eastern Shoshone and the Northern Arapaho.
A lot of people forget Wyoming, said Lynnette. “We have the lowest population of all the states, but we are a unique place. A lot of our regions with ancestral ties to Indigenous people are untouched, and you can feel how preserved they have been over hundreds of years. It’s breathtaking.”
Indigenous Youth Voices 2025 summer hiking trip in the Teton Mountains, Wyoming. (Photo courtesy of Not Our Native Daughters)
At the same time, said Lynnette, there are also serious challenges for Indigenous people in the state. “I would say anywhere in the Northern Plains region, blatant racism is an everyday thing. So we have to have a tough skin living in this region.”
NOND was set to receive transformative environmental justice and sustainability funding for their youth program through the EPA this spring. However, it was all cut due to deep federal funding reductions under the current administration.
Still, none of these challenges are stopping Lynnette. “We’re just going back to our roots, continuing to fundraise and share good messages and good medicine; share the good work collectively with partners. It’s not going to stop anything.”
Meanwhile, Lynnette keeps looking forward for Not Our Native Daughters. She hopes in the future to create more sustainability for the organization and their important youth programming and to hire staff for the first time.
“I’m honored to be able to be a knowledge sharer in youth lives,” she said, “where I can speak healing and empowerment and hopefully raise other leaders to build an equitable future for us as Indigenous people.”
Learn more about Not Our Native Daughters at www.notournativedaughters.org
Written by Sharon Ho Chang, Strategic Communications Manager
Subscribe to SJF’s eNews for updates and funding opportunities.
Follow SJF on Instagram and LinkedIn for photos, videos, grantee stories, and more.
